We have just had a lovely weekend.

In many ways an ORDINARY weekend- and none the less lovely for that.

We had a lovely barbecue with friends on Saturday night to celebrate Michaela’s other birthday-

My brother Steve, his wife Kate and wee Jamie stayed over night, and we spent most of the day in Benmore Gardens, where they were having their open day- craft stalls, plants, music- and lots of sunshine.

We set up a game of cricket with some sticks as stumps and a piece of log as a bat. Lovely.

In the exhibition area in Benmore, there is an exhibition by the late Tim Stead, sculptor/carver/furniture maker/poet.

He died in 2000 aged only 48 after a long illness. This from his obituary in the Guardian

Stead made furniture for galleries, castles, cathedrals and even for Pope John Paul II for his visit to Murrayfield in 1981, yet it was the open intuitive, untutored response of ordinary people that most nourished him. People delighted in his work’s warm honesty and wanted to live with it.

That word ‘ordinary’ again. There is little that is ordinary about the wonderful pieces that Stead made. All that burr elm with its twisted and painful complexity- polished and oiled into something incredibly beautiful. joints and hinges engineered out of a knuckle of wood. Chairs fashioned out of staves of wood to look like the backbone of some long distant creature. But still it is all functional- utilitarian- ordinary.

Like today.